New insights into bi-directional pedestrian flows with heterogeneous speeds: modeling and analyses
Conference presentation @ The 14th Workshop on Computational Transportation Science (CTS 2023)
Abstract
Bi-directional pedestrian flow scenarios are prevalent in urban traffic, occurring on a daily basis. Existing studies primarily treat pedestrians as homogeneous individuals in straight passages, disregarding the heterogeneity observed in real-life situations, and the self-organization phenomena and its formation mechanism of heterogeneous pedestrian flow. In this study, pedestrians are categorized into two groups based on their expected movement speed: fast and slow pedestrians. The improved social force model is used to conduct simulation experiments to explore the impact of speed heterogeneity between pedestrians in different directions, speed differences among pedestrians in the same direction, and the proportion of heterogeneous pedestrians on the macroscopic dynamic characteristics and passage capacity of pedestrians. Through quantitative analysis of lane formation, the effect of speed heterogeneity on the self-organization phenomena is investigated. Simulation results reveal that the macroscopic dynamic characteristics of bi-directional pedestrian flow, under the condition of speed heterogeneity, align with the conclusions drawn from the basic pedestrian flow diagram method. Additionally, the capacity of straight passages exhibits an approximate W-shaped distribution as the proportion of fast pedestrians increases. Furthermore, the presence of speed heterogeneity among pedestrians significantly increases the number of lanes in bi-directional pedestrian flow. The findings of this research, concerning the macroscopic dynamic characteristics and self-organization phenomena of pedestrian flow, provide a valuable theoretical foundation for designing and evaluating public pedestrian facilities, as well as formulating pedestrian evacuation plans in emergencies.
Details
- Presentation: Conference presentation
- Event: The 14th Workshop on Computational Transportation Science (CTS 2023)
- Date: Aug. 2023
- Location: Shanghai, China